Currently, the assembly of heat exchanger cores is accomplished in a manual assembly procedure, where a worker manually stacks a plurality of layered tubes and fin plates with respect to one another. The manually assembled stack is held in place by attaching a peripheral set of side and end plates with respect to one another to hold the manually assembled heat exchanger core in the assembled condition. This manual assembly process is extremely labor intensive and costly. In addition, it is difficult to maintain the amount of production output desired using this manual assembly process.